


pumping RZA, eating pizza

by levendis



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Memes, Virtual Reality, aesthetic, f a n f i c t i o n
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-09
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-10-01 13:27:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10190861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: S-A-D B-O-Y and a very baffled girl リサフランク420 vape it





	

**Author's Note:**

> for anon, who prompted: 12 and companion accidentally land in a V A P O R W A V E hellscape.

 

The floor spread out flat to the haze at the horizon, mostly unbroken. Checkerboard, glossy. Lo-def. Their footsteps were muffled, tinny, buried in the mix of the saxophone-heavy muzak piped out from everywhere and nowhere.

 _Like an 808 hit,_ Bill thought, experimentally tapping her trainers against the tile.

“Where are we?” she asked, her voice blurring and fuzzing out.

“No clue.” The Doctor strode ahead of her, and then stopped. Red coat gone soft pink in this lighting, somehow. His movements too slow, and even more anxious than usual. Something jittery there, ill at ease.

A statue to the left of them. A bust, turned away. Greek, maybe. Flickering in and out.

“Don’t touch it,” he said, as he touched it. An odd expression when his hands hit home, like he was letting something foreign flow through him.

The aqua-blue haze at the horizon was building, moving towards them.

“Is this,” she said. The words floated off, multiplied. Is this, is this, is this. “Is this the internet?”

His face, the statue’s face, swapped back and forth and back and then other faces entirely. Static, a buzzing noise, a sprawl apart of what he was, and the snap back.

She looked at her hands: still normal, all fine. Just something about him, then, in this place.

He was - they were dissipating (and coming back together), their pink and the horizon’s sea-green mingling. And then snapping back together, his familiar dark outline harsh against the blurring not-space. “I don’t know what your television programmes have been telling you, but it doesn’t work like this,” they said, drifting off again.

“Yes, I know. But it does look like the internet.” She shook her head, trying to knock something loose, willing her eyes to focus.

“Like an ad-hoc network of computers? Really?” Said out loud or implied or presented in a serif font, the words floating in front of her.

“No. Like - the internet, internet. The _Internet._ ”

“Oh, now who’s saying the same word over and over like that explains anything.”

“Sorry. Yeah. Right. Okay.” She breathed in and exhaled and counted to ten, her hands held up in a placating gesture. The cloud they were currently curled back up into themselves apologetically.

“There’s a sort of aesthetic, yeah? On the internet, that’s only on the internet, and it looks like this.”

 _Like a meme,_ they communicated. A dolphin swam past.

“Sort of. Similar. Like an art movement, kinda.” She watched the dolphin swim through the pink cloud that the Doctor intermittently was, and tried to not think too hard about it. “A e s t h e t i c.” She pressed her hand to her mouth, willing the memory of the sound of that out of her memory.

 _A E S T H E T I C_  
L  
R  
I  
G  
H  
T

T  
H  
E  
N

, the Doctor said.

“You have a plan?” Bill asked, ducking under the leaves of a palm tree. She found herself holding a can of Arizona ice tea, which she promptly dropped, and watched it explode into slow-motion droplets, a chopped and screwed fountain, liquid glistening and hovering.

 _N O T  R E A L L Y_  
E  
V  
E  
R

S  
A  
Y

N  
E  
V  
E  
R

, they said. _Y O U  N E E D  T O  H A C K  T H E  M A I N F R A M E  天では今後  
_

“That sounds fake,” she said, “but okay.” A tangerine iMac floated up from the ground, the screen displaying what she assumed was Windows 98. The haze was coming nearer, nearer.

“Okay,” she said again. And, with great determination, she hit random keys on the keyboard rapidly, and she hacked the mainframe. “This is more of a cyberpunk, outrun thing,” she said, mostly to herself. “Not really a e s t h - fuck.” She scrubbed at her mouth with the back of her hand, and slammed the Enter key.

Bottles of Fiji filled her vision. The haze was all around her. The Doctor flickered and seemed to smile, almost, and then she blacked out.

 

“And that’s why we take certain safety precautions when using the randomizer,” the Doctor said. All solid and dark and whippet-thin-weird again, hard angles against the blue light of the time rotor.

Bill picked herself off the floor. “But we did that, we can do that. Go…there.”

“Apparently.”

“So we could - ”

“Mmm?”

“Like. Go inside a meme.”

The Doctor stared at her. She could briefly see the Them inside the Him, the not-gendered not-human noncorporeal thing he was. They were. The - one of those. “How d'you feel about the memes about dogs.”

“Love ‘em,” she said.

“You wanna -”

“Yes, please.” She grinned and took his - their - hand, and together they swung the lever home.

(Much time travel, very excitement, such ill-advised, wow)


End file.
